Oye, New Spanish Grammar Guidelines Unveiled

Can a Barcelona truck driver be expected to speak like a Buenos Aires banker? Can rules be imposed on a language spoken by 400 million people stretching from Madrid to Manila?

The academic overseers of the language of Cervantes have takenan ambitious stab at it, unveiling their first Spanish grammarguidelines in nearly 80 years.

The fruit of their toil is a nearly 4,000-page tome in twovolumes presented Thursday, with yet another to come out next year.

It was produced by the Spanish Royal Academy and 21 sisterorganizations in Latin America and other countries where Spanish isspoken, such as the United States and the Philippines, and hastaken them 11 years to compile.

The book is billed as a sort of linguistic map thatpainstakingly documents today's Spanish in all its richness - thereare nearly 20 ways to say ballpoint pen, for instance - and how itvaries from country to country, or within one, or from one socialclass to another.

Indeed, while English speakers face the perennial'you-say-tomayto, I-say-tomahto' dilemma, Spanish is also chockfull of differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and the wayssentences are constructed.

The biggest change from the existing grammar, which dates backto 1931, is that the new book reflects how the language is spokenwhere most Spanish-speakers actually live: Latin America.

In Puerto Rico, for example, it acknowledges the fact thatsubject and verb in a question are often switched around to anorder resembling that of English. So the question "Adonde vastu?" - where are you going? - becomes "Adonde tu vas?" in theU.S. territory.

"Here are all the voices, all the ways of speaking, comingtogether in a grand polyphony," Victor Garcia de la Concha,president of the Spanish language academy, said at Thursday'sceremony. "This book comes from the people, and it is to thepeople that it reaches out."

The new grammar shies from setting cut-and-dry dogma on what iscorrect and what is not, making instead recommendations as to whatthe language gurus generally accept to be proper Spanish. ThePuerto Rican twist, for instance, is respected as a localism butnot something textbook traditional.

These gurus say languages are living things that embrace newwords - often English intruders like Internet - and there is no usein trying to control them completely.

"Rules are set by speakers. What the academy does is observeand document," Garcia de la Concha said at a news conferenceWednesday night.

At Thursday's presentation, King Juan Carlos grew visiblyemotional as he took delivery of a copy of the book. "I am movedby and proud of what we all do for our language," he said.

The task undertaken by the academics was so gargantuan that thefinal product not only is spread into three volumes, but also comesin two smaller sizes: a 750-page manual geared toward students andteachers of Spanish, and a simplified 250-page version aimed at thegeneral public. The jumbo version costs euro120 ($180).

One of the main reasons it took so long to overhaul the 1931grammar book is that the job required computerized linguistic databases and these were not available until about 20 years ago, saidIgnacio Bosque, a Spanish Royal Academy member who coordinated the project.

Even so, despite its nearly 4,000 pages, the book is far fromexhaustive.

"It attempts to reflect the most important aspects becauseincluding everything is impossible," Bosque said. "The languagedoes not fit in just a few pages."

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